World’s Best Hiragana and Katakana Charts

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If you're hunting for downloadable hiragana chart and katakana chart PDFs to print out and put up on your wall, you need something that looks professional, clear, and makes studying fun. More importantly, you need all the hiragana and katakana plus the voiced consonants, and the kana combinations!

This is why we have created the World's Best Hiragana and Katakana Charts, totally free for your kana learning pleasure.

Get your downloadable kana charts and put them on your wall, in your binder, or anywhere else you're able to reference them with ease!

Enjoy :)

Free Hiragana and Katakana Chart PDF Downloads

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Fun fact: The mark is called dakuten and gives "voice" to the k, s, t, and h columns. The mark is called handakuten and makes the h column into consonant p

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The first thing you need to do when learning Japanese is learn hiragana and katakana.

Print these kana charts out, put them up on your wall, and practice reading and writing until you are comfortable.

Need extra guidance? We offer additional hiragana and katakana learning support with our online course, Hiragana and Katakana Mastery.

Should you learn hiragana and katakana? Why not just stick with romaji?

If you plan on making any progress studying Japanese, you do need to learn hiragana and katakana. It's just part of the process, and it will make your life a lot easier in the long run. Do yourself a favor, and learn all your kana as soon as possible into your Japanese study journey, because it's a lot tougher to break the "romaji habit" than to tough it out for a week or two up front and memorize them.

How many hiragana are there? How about katakana?

There are 46 hiragana characters and 46 katakana characters. Counting the "voiced consonants" (diacritics), there are actually 71 characters in each syllabary, but it's simpler to think of them as modifiers rather than new kana. Diacritics are the two dots and the circles you see next to some kana characters (see the top left of our charts), called dakuten and handakuten.

How long does it take to learn hiragana and katakana?

It depends how motivated you are! You could memorize hiragana and katakana in a weekend, or space it out over a month. On average, it takes most people a couple weeks of relaxed study (~30 minutes a day) to memorize all the kana.

Tip: With kana flashcards, you can test yourself daily until you master all the characters!

You can make your own hiragana and katakana flashcards, or you can go grab our set of pre-designed kana flashcards with over 300 Japanese vocabulary included.

FREE BONUS DOWNLOAD:

If you want to practice hiragana, how about you test yourself with one of our downloadable kana word searches?

We'll give you this one for free! 

(If you like it and you want to challenge yourself further, it's included as part of our Hiragana and Katakana Mastery online course or you can grab a downloadable 10-pack here.)

Download your free hiragana word search and test yourself today!

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Risu Press connects Japanese learners with Japanese language schools across Japan. We facilitate communication, help you with your student visa application, and get you into the school that meets your language learning goals. Whether you want to experience life in Tokyo, or maybe you want to live and study in the countryside, check out our Japanese Language School program today and get the info you need! If you're in the market to learn kanji fundamentals, see our partners over at Outlier Linguistics for some great tools to expand your kanji knowledge.
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